Journal article
Contemporary flowstone development links early hominin bearing cave deposits in South Africa
R Pickering, JD Kramers, PJ Hancox, DJ de Ruiter, JD Woodhead
Earth and Planetary Science Letters | Published : 2011
Abstract
The Cradle of Humankind cave sites in South Africa preserve fossil evidence of four early hominin taxa: Australopithecus africanus, Australopithecus sediba, Paranthropus robustus and early Homo. In order to integrate this record into a pan-African scenario of human evolutionary history it is critical to have reliable dates and temporal ranges for the southern African hominins. In the past a lack of precise and accurate chronological data has prevented the evaluation of the temporal relationships between the various sites. Here we report new uranium-lead (U-Pb) radiometric ages obtained from sheets of calcium carbonate flowstone inter-bedded between clastic cave sediments at the site of Swart..
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Awarded by Schweizerischer Nationalfonds zur Förderung der Wissenschaftlichen Forschung
Funding Acknowledgements
The late Tim Partridge is acknowledged for his support of this research. Further grateful acknowledgements to Ron Clarke, Steven Motsumi, Able Molepolle and Lucas Sekowe (Sterkfontein); Travis Pickering, Morris Sutton, Jason Heaton, Bob Brain, Kathy Kuman, Stuart Ford, Andrew Phaswana (Swartkrans); Christine Steininger, The Fossil Trackers Team (Cooper's Cave); Lee Berger, Paul Dirks, Peter Schmidt (Malapa); Ingeburga Hebeisen (University of Bern); Bence Paul, Alan Grieg, Roland Maas, John Hellstrom, Janet Hergt (University of Melbourne). The South African Heritage Resources Agency granted excavation permits. Bernard Wood, Julia Lee-Thorp, Andy Herries, and Sarah Feakins are thanked for their encouragement and useful discussions; Simon Pickering for editing. Three anonymous reviewers and Eric Delson are thanked for their insightful, constructive and helpful reviews, Peter deMenocal for editorial handling. Funding was received from the Swiss National Research Foundation (grants 20-113658 to JDK and PBBEP2-126195 to RP) and the University of Melbourne (McKenzie Fellowship to RP).